DICE launches advertising agency, security products

DETROIT—DICE announced a new security-focused ad agency among the company's new services and products at the DICE Users Group conference.

“We have on-staff videographers, and on-staff web developers, and content managers. It's an entire advertisement agency that we've built inside of Dice,” Cliff Dice, company CEO, told Security Systems News. “We formed it in the last 12 months, but announced it at DUG.”

The advertising agency will not restrict its work to DICE customers, he said. It is a six-person division of DICE, right now, but it could get spun-off as it grows.

Dice said the ad agency will be on a monthly subscription basis, which is “going to be hard for another agency to compete with.”

Which companies in the alarm space would the ad agency appeal to most? “I think definitely residential and commercial alarm companies, even integrators. I think that it really plays to everyone,” he said.

At DUG, which took place here in late April, DICE also announced its new cloud video recording offering, “which we're doing in beta right now. It'll be released later fall,” Dice said. The beta test is recording for 48,000 cameras in a Fortune 500 company, he said. The new solution “obsoletes DVRs and NVRs,” he added.

“The problem with [DVRs and NVRs] has always been that you didn't know if the camera was recording, and if the unit goes out—you have nothing, and if someone breaks in and takes the DVR then you don't have any recording.” The cloud offering can let end users know which cameras aren't recording, he said.

“Our entire focus going forward is: Any of these tools can be used with anybody,” Dice said. “There are more customers that have other automation systems than DICE using our cloud receiver farm. So, the signals come in on the alarm network, hit our receiver farm, and then we push them into Bold, MAS, MicroKey—everybody.”

The CVR changes the economics of video recording, according to Dice. “There's no physical piece of equipment on site, there's no investment that needs to be made; it really changes the dynamics of commercial video recording.”

DICE provides connectivity through its recently spun-off telecom IPtelX.net, “Service is guaranteed then, because you are not sharing the customer's Internet pipe,” Dice said. Connectivity will be included in the subscription cost, he said.

The conference also featured a presentation from Lori Kibler, applications manager for Vector Security, which beta-tested DICE's new sales system, Matrix Sales CRM, with 840 residential sales people. Matrix Sales CRM integrates quoting, inventory, contracts and the central station's software, Dice said.